Welcome to my new blog

Hi there.

I'm a writer and freelance teacher and editor with an addiction to new technology.

Having haphazardly kept a blog elsewhere over the past couple of years, I'm determined to start afresh with this one. The challenge will be to keep it updated, interesting and relevant. Time will tell.

Thursday, September 18, 2014

Uncovering a Hidden
History

For much of my life, I had absolutely no idea that my grandfather,
Michael McCann, had fought in the First World War. I grew up with the image of
him as the archetypal Irish nationalist hero of the first decades of the
twentieth century. A brooding photograph of him in Free State Army uniform and
flat-topped army cap dominated the dresser in my mother’s kitchen; stories of
his escapades in the War of Independence and the Civil War were an integral
part of family lore. But there was no mention of the earlier conflict my
grandfather was involved in, as a Lance Corporal for the Royal Munster Fusiliers.
His experience, like that of so many of the hundreds of thousands of Irishmen
who fought in World War I, had been quietly obliterated from the official narrative.
There was no room in the nationalist mythology for any stories about those who
fought for other causes.

When I began to research my grandfather’s life in greater
detail, in preparation for a memoir I hoped to write about him, I first turned
to the obvious sources to flesh out the information I already had about his
campaigns in the War of Independence and the Civil War. The Irish Military
Archives were very helpful in finding Witness Statements that mentioned my
grandfather, and his role in the various arson attacks in the North East of
England that led to his imprisonment in Parkhurst in 1920. Newspaper cuttings
testified to his involvement in ambushes during the Irish Civil War. The Garda Archives
were able to provide me with an A4 sheet detailing his subsequent career as a
Detective Inspector with the newly established Garda Siochána.

It was when I was trawling through genealogy websites to see if
I could get more information about my grandfather’s family, who were small
farmers in a townland called Derryronane in County Mayo, that the greatest surprise
was uncovered. By this stage I knew he’d fought in the Great War – my uncle
Liam had given me the one artefact linking my grandfather to the British Army:
his soldier’s pay-book and wallet. But it wasn’t until I visited the genealogy
website, and came across a posting from a complete stranger who was also
seeking information about the Derryronane McCanns, that I got the visual
evidence. The stranger turned out to be my second cousin – a direct descendant
of my grandfather’s brother, John – and after we had exchanged emails he
offered to send me various family photos.

When the email arrived with the PDF attachment, I casually
scrolled through the old black and white photos of people who were vaguely
familiar and others who were completely new to me. Then I came across one that
brought me up short. A young man in British Army uniform poses with ceremonial
cane, right-hand resting on the back of a tall, mahogany and leather chair. The
pale eyes stare out quizzically with an expression I’ve often seen on the face
of my elder brother, Tom. I knew, without having to be told, that this was a
photograph of my grandfather, Michael McCann.

My mother, Mai, who is a marvellous raconteur, and who, at
the age of 85, has an extraordinary memory for events that happened decades ago,
had never seen that photograph, nor had any of her surviving siblings. I can
only conclude that he sent it as a postcard to his family back on the farm in
Derryronane, and that it was kept in his brother’s family and taken to the UK
when a niece emigrated there sometime in the 1940s. I can’t imagine that it was
ever displayed proudly on a mantelpiece; in post-independent Ireland, few were
prepared to speak openly about family members who had fought for King and
Country. So much had happened in the intervening years – a country divided by
traumatic Civil War and attempting to come to terms with all the violence and
petty hatreds that conflict had unleashed. Small wonder they adopted the
classic Irish strategy of ‘whatever you say, say nothing.’

My grandfather must have seen extraordinary things in his
early life but remained reticent throughout his later years. The various
injuries (shrapnel wounds to the leg and wrist, a toe shot off) were the
physical manifestation but there was little evidence of the mental suffering. One
can only imagine the sort of post-traumatic stress he would have suffered, and
was forced to contain within himself.

That tension between the public and the private expressions
of identity captured my imagination; rather than memoir, I began to think about
poems that might explore that tension. That was the genesis of this new
collection which presents a parallel
sequence of poems, one relating to my relationship with my own father, who
died from a long illness during the making of the book; the second exploring the
life of my grandfather, whose story slowly emerges through my mother's
memories, and my own research. I was delighted when my publisher agreed
to put Granddad’s World War I photo on the cover.

I’ve no idea what Michael McCann would make of the book:
puzzlement, perhaps, or annoyance that anyone was making much of what he
himself had discounted or kept to himself. But I do hope that he might
understand the motivation of the writer: to tell the story of a heroism typical
of his generation, a heroism in danger of being forgotten once this decade of
commemoration concludes.